Haunted Television: Trauma and the Specter in the Archive

Abstract

On television, the ghost enables a revisitation of traumatic histories and a revelation of injustice beyond death, in genres as diverse as the ghost drama and the public information film. In these texts, the ghost brings about awareness and acceptance of past trauma, or avoidance of the repetition of the mistakes of the past. However, if television haunts us – not only in Sconce’s sense of a form of ‘occult liveness’ (2000) but in its ability to reanimate the dead – then the recent resurfacing of Jimmy Savile, a dead television celebrity and serial rapist, might be seen as a more troubling and problematic form of televisual haunting. This article explores the ideas that television itself can be ‘haunting’, that television companies and their archives might become haunted, and that the production of programming, from documentary to drama, can sometimes act as a form of exorcism, or at least a working through, of the traumas and hidden histories that the spectral figure represents. It explores the discourse of haunting that permeates the reception of Savile’s posthumous image, and thinks about what viewing Savile as a spectre reveals about the television archive. The article not only looks at documentary programming about Savile and his crimes, but also thinks about how dramas such as National Treasure (Channel 4, 2016) and the Sherlock episode The Lying Detective’ (BBC1, tx. 1/8/17) are haunted by his spectre.